


the instincts

by literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-27
Updated: 2014-04-27
Packaged: 2018-01-20 23:29:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1529762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte/pseuds/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's like...instinct. Instinct! The instinct of corpses."</p>
            </blockquote>





	the instincts

The morbid sound of flesh smacking against the glass door echoed through the diner. Éponine sat in one of the shredded red leather seats on the counter, chin in her hands. She smelled of grease and death.

With the curtains closed, the room was dark except for the flickering, dying neon sign stuffed behind one of the tables that occasionally croaked out the word “CLOSED” in red. She knew that it was most definitely unsafe to keep the lights off, since she wouldn't be able to see a corpse coming out of the kitchen until it was biting her neck. And it wasn't a good idea to be sitting in the middle of another dusty, abandoned building without any bullets and lugging around the splinters of a broken bat, while corpses banged on the front door.

But it didn't really matter anymore.

The awful groaning outside persisted hungrily. Their faces dragged on the glass as they lurched back and forth in front of the building.

Éponine forced herself to blink. Her mouth was dry. Her eyes burned. Her ears were still ringing from the gunshots earlier.

She thought, well. I figured I wouldn't die gloriously. Just another decomposed, half-eaten body in a diner. She hoped her corpse didn't look too rotted, but she also hoped it was just unrecognizable enough that anybody who still cared about her wouldn't feel too bad about blowing her brains out.

She considered the wrecked bat, splattered with greenish-blue blood from the corpses, in her lap and quickly decided she would wait until they busted down the door to die. They were after the blood trickling down her head and from her nose. They were after the heart beating stubbornly in her chest through a world contagious with death.

Also, the raw meat in her backpack was another reason why the corpses hadn't given up on getting into the diner.

She figured that martyrdom must have become as infectious as the undeath. Ever since Valjean had thrown himself into the mob of corpses that sniffed out their shelter, grenade in hand, it had been itching at her, like she was waiting for the opportunity to sacrifice herself.

Maybe this was how suicidal thoughts took their shape in this kind of situation. 

She laughed – coughed, more like it – alone. Cosette and Marius seemed to easily forget how important and dear they were. And not just in the mushy emotional way that ruined her tough outer shell.

Immune! Immune to the undeath! Of course, being immune meant nothing when the corpses could still rip you to pieces.

But in their blood, they carried something. A future, a hope, a chance. Possibly a cure, if the Joly man she had left them with turned out to be worth more than paranoia. (Admittedly, she did have faith in Joly to discover something about Cosette and Marius's immunity that would help with the corpses who now outnumbered the living. But she was a realist, or, in Cosette's words, a stubborn pessimist.)

A long scratch along the window pane behind her dragged her out of her thoughts. Éponine jumped up on instinct, but settled back into her seat. Death would find her before the sun had set. It was eerily relaxing to have a few moments to herself to wrap up all the loose ends in her head. 

She hoped Cosette would not be too upset when she didn't return; she hoped to God that they wouldn't try to set out on some rescue mission. They would find her note and they would get the rest of the details from Joly, and then they would get out all their grief before moving on. They needed to get out of the city at least before the month was over – which would be next week – when the corpses from downtown would make their way up here.

See, she had learned about the corpses and how they hunted. Well, not by herself, but with the corpse who had bit her. Musichetta hadn't really reached undeath when Éponine talked to her, but she was pretty damn close to it.

“Listen to me,” she spat out, teeth that had once been finely brushed and flossed now drenched in red. “We figured it out. What they're doing. We figured it out. It's like...instinct. Instinct! The instinct of corpses. We have maps...the maps. The maps are in the apartment...burned down now, though, I suppose. Had to when the corpses followed us home.”

Éponine had, at first, listened out of pity. Musichetta was obviously dying. Green blotched her brown skin; her hair greyed before Éponine's eyes. Something like duty, perhaps respect for the dead, kept her rooted to the spot as the woman on the ground coughed out her story.

Her words made sense only when Éponine had stayed too long, and the instincts Musichetta talked about grew stronger in her decaying brain, and her blunt teeth were buried in Éponine's wrist before she could flinch.

Her saliva infected the wound upon contact.

Éponine kicked her, holding back screams in case other corpses were near.

She shot Musichetta, but the bullets that broke through her greenish-blue flesh did nothing to heal Éponine's wound. When the corpse had fallen and Éponine had buried the body, she sat on the ground for a few minutes staring at her cut. It was small, yet it was fatal.

That's when she found Joly. Musichetta had given Éponine the address to the apartment she shared with the doctor and Bossuet, and it was, in fact, burned to the ground. However, Éponine found Joly rummaging in the ashes, picking through the house with pliers and gloved hands and muttering about his work. 

He reacted badly when she told him about Musichetta, but he collected himself neatly enough to earn her respect. He told her all about what he had been researching, about the migration patterns of the corpses, about the infected nervous systems and the swollen brain, and then he had asked her about Bossuet.

She told him with a blank face that, whoever he was, he was probably dead. Joly stood there, hand on the ledge of a staircase that ended halfway up in the air, and laughed the type of laughter she had heard in countless terrified people.

“Yes. Well,” he had choked out, “Probably. Most likely. He is unlucky enough to have been caught in the fire instead of. Oh. Well.” Then he laughed unhappily again and sat down on the stairs.

“I recovered this,” he said suddenly, and he went to hand her a blackened scrap of paper. 

“No. Don't let me touch it.”

“Why? It's fascinating, how the corpses work, aren't you curious why they walk that way? You see – Oh. Oh. Oh. I see.”

Joly noticed the greenish-blue scratch on her wrist, and he swallowed. 

She brought him back to the shelter. He walked a few paces behind her as she directed him there, nervous and constantly asking her if she “felt odd.”

Marius and Cosette were sleeping peacefully in their bed, wrapped in the only good blanket they had left. The two horridly wonderful fools didn't even budge when she opened the door.

Éponine's imprint next to their bodies was still there; she was the only one who rolled in her sleep. 

She left Joly there, with his crap of paper and explanations for things she never intended to know about. Marius, Cosette, and he would be heroes of the world, they would work together for a cure, they would find out something fantastic about blood and nervous systems that would save everyone, and Éponine would be safe in the shadows she had been born into. 

She grabbed two things to defend herself with because she'll be damned if she ever in her life goes down without a fight, and then she left with a note and a backpack full of meat.

"Don't follow me," she told Joly as she locked the door shut.

The meat was back-up, in case her body was too far decomposed to attract corpses. 

Her heart rate was slowing down. She had gotten in some good punches before locking herself in the diner. She hummed, and put her head down on the table as a greenish-blue fist broke through the glass door.


End file.
